alt Hacker NewsOpenBSD 7.9
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With all the security issues constantly being uncovered in other Operating Systems - which will only accelerate with Ai - it’s time everyone considers OpenBSD. Their decades-long security-focus is second to none. We have fully converted from Ubuntu/Debian to OpenBSD. No looking back.
The big news for some of us is that Exim has been dropped from ports. Here is a good article about transitioning from Exim to OpenSMTPD:
https://nxdomain.no/~peter/time_for_opensmtpd.html
I tried using OpenSMTPD a long time ago, shortly after it came out, but things were not stable enough. I guess it is time to give it another go...
I used it a bit, had it installed for a while on a G4 PowerBook (must have been early-ish 2000s). I like the no-nonsense attitude towards blobs, security focus. Overall the experience was very good. The bit of code I read was also written nicely. I'll always endorse it and should really install it somewhere again in the near future.
This is also the 60th release. Congrats team.
Anyone here using OpenBSD? If so, for what purpose?
I’ve always wanted to use NetBSD for an application for an embedded system / IoT device but never had the pleasure (yet!).
"Introduced a mechanism to manage CPU cores with different speeds in the scheduler. The sysctl(8) variable "hw.blockcpu" takes a sequence of 4 letters: S (for SMT), P (regular performance CPU), E (efficient CPU, generally 80% to 50% as fast), and L (lethargic CPU) which are even slower. Set this to select CPUs to kick out of the scheduler (SL by default). Currently works on amd64 and arm64."
I have to admit I am not entirely convinced about the merit of having slow cores on the cpu at all(big/little architecture). You don't want your tasks to be scheduled on them. And even for background tasks shouldn't it be better to have them complete faster for less power? To say nothing about what if they have different features. what happens when a process that wants to use cpu feature X(avx512?) gets scheduled on a cpu without X?
Openbsd took the quick and dirty shotgun approach here in disabling the slow cores. But is there even a good heuristic for scheduling jobs on them? The only thing I can think of is some sort complicated mechanism of putting manual tags in the executable or thread. A "this process is suitable for slow cores" sort of thing.
I was reading about this on on the lists, apparently a naive scheduler puts a process wherever and some new big/little systems have very slow little cores. This really hit recompiling code hard.
> Replaced the cas spinlock in kernel mutexes with a "parking" lock.
Anyone know what a "parking lock" is (and how it works)?
I couldn't find anything on the man pages about it.
I wish OpenBSD supported Bluetooth. Unfortunately, its absence is a deal breaker for me. I did use OpenBSD on the desktop it was great.
Sorry for the off-topic, but I wish our FreeBSD camp could roll back a little from this faux-corporate glass ball without soul and a font from the early 90s spaceship toy box, to Beastie and a stylish serif. What I was trying to say - I'm in envy. OpenBSD artwork is absolutely amazing!
Sweet, I was just wondering when 7.9 would release. And with a song! We haven't gotten one of those in a while iirc
They've made major progress on the WiFi front in this release, finally getting experimental WiFi 6 support.
> Enabled IPv6 autoconf (SLAAC) by default.
Sweet! I’m just about to replace pfsense with openbsd on my router. Smoothly setting up ipv6 is a bit of a headscratcher atm, mainly because i’ve never had to understand it before.
Announcement mail: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-announce&m=177919671915512&w=2
While I daily Linux on my workstation, OpenBSD is my favorite OS, by far, and I use it wherever it makes sense for me.
I use openbsd as my server via openbsd.amsterdam - so much easier to maintain than a linux server for my personal sites.
Direct link to the song so you can play in the browser: https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/songs/song79.ogg
Hey ... I had no idea OpenBSD had an official song. I think all distros (Unix and Linux) need an official song.
Release Engineering. Noun. See Also OpenBSD
OpenBSD does a lot of things well, definitely punches above their weight. One underrated feature is their approach to releasing. No "When it's done" here. Like clockwork twice a year, they slow down, clean the shop, get their experiments in order and cook a release, a stable point in time. More projects could learn a thing or two from this.
Do we know if openbsd is one of the blessed 50 glasswing partners?
I would really love to adopt OpenBSD but the one thing I can't deal with is the absence of journalized filesystem.
Just the idea not to be able to recover after a power cut and work is hard to accept to be honest.
I have been recently considering running it on a minimal Alpine ZFS host but I am not sure how much I can optimize the display experience since I do not think OpenBSD support QXL/SPICE.
I would be curious if someone found a way...
Congrats on another successful release, OpenBSD team! Happy user since the 4.x days.
Neat that they're working on Intel's p/e/l core support. I was just comparing Linux and windows support history the other day.
i use it and its secure
BSDs are interesting projects. As I understand it there's a broad difference of them all doing things reasonably well but a) Free is general-purpose, b) Net is especially portable/many architecture and Open is security focused
I wonder why they didn‘t spend 20 minutes to make that web page work better with smartphones.
OpenBSD 7.9 release artwork by Lyra Henderson
https://www.openbsd.org/images/PinkPuffy.png
https://www.openbsd.org/images/puffy79.gif
Release song is "Diamond in the Rough" - Composed & produced by Bob Kitella.
https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#79
Apparel (t-shirts, so far): https://openbsdstore.com/